Tired of building CRUD Apps?. Here's a way to make you stand out in the job market

A question that most of us have in our minds is, “I know how to create a CRUD App with X/Y technology, now what?. How can I make myself stand out in this competitive job market? ”

Well, I had this question too in my mind and kept asking other developers and mentors. Honestly, I couldn’t find a proper answer from anywhere.

After so many experiments, I found a way that actually worked for me to get job opportunities. I am going to show you the way that can help you to stand out in the job market. Because, after applying this technique, I saw some good results for my actions.

Doing CRUD Apps are not bad

I am not saying that practicing CRUD Applications are bad. It’s actually a good way to start learning a programming language or technology. I recommend you to start with that.

But once, you learn how to do it with a particular language or technology. Don’t repeat yourself doing CRUD Applications again and again.

Try to spend less time learning a programming language by doing CRUD. Once you feel you’re comfortable, start to move on.

What next?

Once you become an experienced developer or intermediate on web/mobile development. People/companies will start to expect more from you than just doing CRUD kind of applications. Let me clarify one thing about development.

As a developer, our responsibility is not just about building features and deploying them to server. It involves understanding the requirement and thinking about an effective solution for the problem statement and then finally implementing them as a feature or product.

People value this skill more than just knowing how to implement a CRUD or any technical specification.

When i realized this, i started thinking about how to improve/ practice this skill.

War field ≠ Practice field

This is such a strong statement. For example, If a guy practices GoLang for 6 months on his personal projects, it is not equal to a guy working on GoLang for production applications or a company. A practice field will never be a war field

So, I started building products rather than building a Facebook Clone, Netflix Clone, and any product clone just for the sake of portfolio.

Finding Product Ideas, The Secret Recipe

I have seen many people stuck in this phase. It becomes a never-ending loop for them, including me. I overcome this stage by start building asap.

Firstly, write down the problems that you have in your daily life. it can be from,

• Automating boring tasks in your day job.
• Some repetitive tasks in your hobby.
• Your freelancing client’s repetitive requirement.

Here’s an interesting article that explains finding ideas. If you think that finding an idea is difficult for you. I recommend you to check this newsletter

I did the same process and came up with a problem statement that I was facing for a long time. It’s about blogging and sharing them across social platforms. It was a manual process and time-consuming. I wanted to spend more time on producing high quality content rather than marketing them.

When I researched about it, I couldn’t find an affordable product offering a solution. So, I decided to build. You can follow the same way and try to find a problem statement that you actually face on a daily basis.

Once you define the problem statement. It is important to define a scope and deadline for it. Try to make it a 1-month roadmap to develop a complete application. It’s good to make it short rather than taking it too long to build it.(it can be a MVP or initial version of the product).

Launch and Market it

Once you build the product and its features. it is important to launch it and market it. Marketing is an essential step in this process.

Here’s the product that I built like that,

Once I built it, I launched it on ProductHunt, and it went viral and became #2 Product of the Day.

You might be thinking ,“why I am asking you to build a complete product just to stand out in the job market or to get job opportunities”.

Honestly, I never thought that building a product like this and market it brings job opportunities. But, it brings me a lot of job opportunities. Many startup founders, Company’s HR professional in a similar domain contacted me to ask if I am looking for a job opportunity.

Building products like this will actually prove that you can build and ship a product in confidence. More than that, it proves that you can understand problem statements well and ship them as features.

I hope this article helps you to find a way to stand out in the job market. If you would like to read more articles, consider subscribing to the newsletter. we will send interesting reads and articles right to your inbox